TOTAL

$3,974.22 U.S.D

Stuck! I’ve felt stuck at around this number for the last few months. It’s completely my fault. I haven’t been putting in the hours. Last year, I was doing easy 6-8 hour days of solid work. These days, I’ll be lucky to do 4. In fact, most of the weeks I’m probably working 12 hours all up and my income reports reflect that. I’m going to make a vow to change this in June. To start, let’s try bump this to at least $5,000. Baby steps have always worked best for me. Setting a big goal at the end of the year, broken down to smaller, more achievable goals.

Focusing on Teespring Gem Videos

A lot of my time this month was spent focusing on Teespring Gem Videos. They seem never ending with SO many topics to do! I spend a good 2 weeks working almost exclusively on this and made 1 every day, (on some days I did 2!).

It takes a lot of time and seems to be help full but takes my time out of launching Teespring Campaigns. This blog has become a bit of an addiction and it’s hard to pull myself away to work on my real business but it needs to be done. I’m going to probably blog a couple of times a week, maybe 3, but June will be a heavy focus on Teespring or something else.

Teespring Minimum Sales Requirement Sucks!

I’ve made so many sales in my Teespring Career that I never got paid for. Why? Because they weren’t enough to make the minimum print order. I think this adds up to at least $4k. Remember, back in the day the didn’t have an auto print for when sales reach at least 3. Some times I’d have a goal of 50 and make 35 sales and they wouldn’t be printed! It sucked so much. In many cases I had to buy the rest myself.

These days, it’s a little easier but still annoying. I would cut my losses by almost half if Teespring printed every order. For this reason I’m trying a few different custom print websites. I’m working with Teechip at the moment and it seems to be working well. Their profit margins are way bigger and they print every order! Feel free to suggest others and tell me your experiences.

Working on Long Term Projects

This was another focus this month. There was a lot of experimenting but not really getting anywhere progress wise. I learned how to make BIG lists but I have little to no idea how to continually monetise them. I think the idea is to just keep hitting them with offers/products at a routinely time while at the same time providing them with something valuable. What all these are, I still have to figure out but right now I’m sitting on 15k subscribers lol.

I better work out how to make money off them or my aweber subscription fee will start eating me alive!

The main reason I wanted to learn list building was to learn one of the core essential business skills. Paid marketing, (which is what we do with Teespring),is one. It gets you front end sales and new customers which is great. I need to be able to turn these customers into repeat customers which is where email list building comes in.

I’m going to start working more with the list in June. I’ll email a few offers and see how I go.

Motivation Levels

Last year I would wake up first thing in the morning and throw out 10 campaigns before 7am. That’s right, I’d wake up at 4 or 5am, a totally ludicrous hour, and get straight into it. Why? Because I was so motivated to increase my income and hit my 150k at the end of 2014 which I was JUST shy of. I had nothing else going through my head but this one goal. This year, I’m doing so many things. Boxing, Eating healthy, Gym, Business, Relationships, etc. When you have too many goals, things can get very messy.

From now on, I’m going to spend 8 hours MINIMUM on work related activities, 5 days a week, no excuses! That’s a lot of time to be spending on launching campaigns/growing your business. With this mentality, let’s see if I can get back in the green this year with my Teespring campaigns.

Focusing On Making BIG Money and Getting Rich

That headline sounded a bit like an ebook you would have bought some time during your IM career. The problem with running a revenue generating blog is that you can get very comfortable with the income. I make about $5k Aus which is about an 80k salary, inclusive of taxes. That’s pretty good for the level of work needed to maintain it!

Unfortunately, it’s taken my mind of the bigger goal which was getting RICH. Not making 5k a month but making 100k+ a month. I know that sounds ludicrous but people are doing it. This requires a lot more effort initially and a totally different mind set. For starters, you need to think it’s possible. Check out Pat Flynn & Entrepreneur On Fire for instance. They’re killing it! May income report 525k!? WTH?

There are heaps of others doing as good or even better than this, it makes my income look like peanuts.

Focus on Systems Not Goals

I’m not exactly sure who said this or where I got it from but it was a good little thing to think about. Instead of focusing on Goals we should be focusing on perfecting systems. For example, instead of focusing on losing 20kg, what if we were to focus on getting into a routine of hitting the gym at 8am, first thing in the morning and only eating a set amount of calories/day?

The more we can break down this process and aim for it, the better our chances of hitting it. The goal will be met eventually as you’ve perfected the process to get there. I’ve found that this type of thinking makes ‘the dream’ more achievable. It’s easy to set a goal and ‘think’ your getting there as you work towards it. Focusing on the system lets you evaluate EVERY DAY if you’re doing the right things to get there. So instead of making another goal of hitting 150k this year, I should be focusing on something like,

Launch 10 Teespring Campaigns

Launch 10 CPA campaigns/angles

1 blog post

Spend 2 hours on long term projects

(Get into the routine of doing the above set of tasks every day!)

Eating Habits – A Big Contributor

One of the biggest, (if not, THE biggest), contributor to how much I work on my business per day is my diet. I find the more junk I put into my body, the more it rejects the desire to do anything productive. I feel lethargic ALL day long and the bed seems like the best place to spend my daily 24 hours.

Eating healthy totally kills this mindset. Your body won’t allow you to sit on your bed. You’ll have too much energy of that. I’ve experienced it before. When I was at the peak of my diet, I was able to work all day non stop, with no sleep breaks and still be able to bounce up in the morning ready to do another shift. The more raw fruit and veggies I eat, the better my work performance.

Conclusion

May was more working on my long term projects and slowly getting back into my Teespring roots. You see, to make the profits I was last year, I need to start launching more campaigns. That’s the simple truth. It worked time and time again last year but I’ve been way to slack in 2015. It’s time to realize this and make a decision to be persistent.

See you guys in June!

– Mateen

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I’ll check Teespring university or Teespring mastermind but for the most part I’ll stick to myself and keep working on my stuff. I have email contacts with a few guys that do teespring so that helps too.

just want to warn you mateen…teechip quality SUCKS! their customers always coimplain of quality of print and their cutomer service is not always there to help. watch out!
thanks for your insights!
you should share how you built your list to 15k! how much did you spend on building it?
wheres your blog income coming from? affiliate links – affplaybook/software?
thanks again!

Oh really? I’ll give it a shot and if I hear complains I’ll switch it.

The list was built in another niche not related to this blog. I’m waiting to successfully monetise it and THEN I’ll start blogging about it. No point building lists if you don’t know how to make money from them!

I just got little inspired by the fact of dreaming or goal to 100k a month. One should have a dream like the sky, he/she can fulfill the dream like a river. Thank you for your tips here in this post. I Think for the first time i am in this blog. I will be following you and talking to you with some of blogger tips and tricks!

Just want to say I and a friend are two lads (24 and 25) in the UK recently starting our teespring journey and of course are determined to reach the same levels of success as yourself to be able to be in a financial place that allows us so much more freedom for ourselves and our families…and future families!

Your blog is really inspiring and we know it’s just a numbers game. We’ve set up 3 campaigns so far with no success (small numbers I know compared to yourself taking 50 campaigns to tip) but we will keep persevering.

I just wanted to ask that, with your tutorials, are they still relevant and what you do when approaching your campaigns today in terms of niche research, targeting method and retargeting and scaling etc. Tony Robbins says a good way to create success is model those who are successful so just want to try and use your story as inspiration as well as many others out there and learn and apply the methods of the best out there 🙂

Also sorry do you mainly do your own designs or outsource using fiverr etc.?

Thanks for dropping by. I started Internet Marketing with another mate too. It’s good to do it together, makes the road a little easier at the start.

Good you guys know it’s a numbers game. There’s no secret here, just keeping going at it relentlessly!

Yes, all my blog tutorials are still relevant. There might be small changes to the advertising platform or some products but the essentially it should be the same.

I mainly do my own designs but if I need help with something I’ll outsource it. I don’t use fiverr as I feel the quality there is bad, (in my experience), but I outsource on elance.com all the time. I found a designer which I worked with for a good 6 months there.

All the best to you and your friends! You guys will get there as long as you keep at it, it’s just a matter of when.

Also Mateen sorry one question. I think you have mentioned this in a blog already but we took your advice and followed all these fb pages that promote tees so we can see ones that are selling now. We have noticed that the successful ones seem to be from fb pages specialising in a particular niche. Sometimes the pages are pure shirt selling and sometimes the pages has gone to effort in posting other engaging content also for viral purpose. I feel with us working full-time we don’t have time for the latter and wondering if you feel it makes a difference having a specialised niche page for each shirt or just a general shirt page called…epic tees for example. With teespring there are so many niches to hit it feels like you’d limit yourself by just aiming and concentrating on one if this all makes sense?!

That’s fine. Start with a generic Tee FaceBook page but once a certain campaign starts to pick up, make a new ad post in a new niche related Facebook page and advertise from there. I don’t bother maintaining the FaceBook page, I guess it’s good if you have the time but it’s too time consuming for me.

So yes, your approach is perfectly fine.

matt singh
June 17, 2015 at 12:41 pm

Awesome and yeah agree with the time consuming part. Cheers again man really appreciate you taking the time to comment back and help us out 🙂

The income comes from the few products I mention here and there within my posts. My Aff Playbook referrals, Affiliate network referral commissions, etc. I could be making a lot more if I make my blog more ‘salesy’ but I like having my info free, gets more people to my site 😀

Great stuff. I have a solution to your problem with teespring and its different to any other similar service. I even looking to make guides on how to do it. I’ve got great margins on tees also.

My problem is I’m working on campaigns to make a case study and I cannot figure out Facebook ads.

I’ve run a post engagement ad that gets great engagement.. But it’s only had a handful of clicks. It made a sale in the first 45mins and one other but my link to the product had only been clicked 6 times. This might seem like I’m onto something, my design is great everyone loves it (including validating it with people in the niche before I got started) and post engagement is good. It’s getting likes and people are tagging others in the comments. I’m at 0.04-0.05c an engagement but very little clicks to links and 500 engagements. 20 likes 19comments then clicks on pictures.

Maybe I’ve set the post wrong and should’ve made it a link? Not sure, I need to figure out fb ads

I’ve also decided to run conversions for websites now. I’m getting much more clicks through to my product but no further sales.

I’ve spend $20 on ads so far and I’ve made $51 in sales. So I’m up and know this can work but I need to figure out how so I can scale it up.

Would love if you emailed me some tips or if you’d like to discuss the way I’m doing it. Haven’t seen anyone really do it my way yet.

I’m going to read through more of your fb ads stuff. Great work here, mate. Keep it up and have a good day.

That’s how it is in most cases. A lot of engagement but a small amount of clicks. At the end of the day, if you’re making a profit then you’re doing it right. You can email me if you want, I’ll take a look at your set up.

4-5 cents per engagement is great. Looks like you’re making a profit too which is also good. Now, you’re looking for consistent sales. If that’s happening, then start upping the budget a little and see if ROI maintains.

So is it better to stay with engagement or target conversions per website. I know it really has to be tested. I made 2 sales within $5 of ad spend and then nothing since. I’ve spent about $20 in total. Maybe I’ll increase the daily budget to $15 and see how it goes.

I’m also in Melbourne. We can probably talk about ventures in the future 🙂

To properly test something, you need to drive a lot of volume to make sure the data is accurate. I’ve stuck with engagement at the start but once I have a profitable campaign then I’ll switch it to target conversions.